[Flightgear-devel] Tooltips / usability
A wee heads-up, I'm working on tooltip support, since I think it could offer a huge usability win. There's a couple of points here: - hovering over a pickable item can show a configurable prompt: think 'Avionics Master: ON' or 'Fuel tank selector: LEFT TANK' - pickable controls, including the new knob animation, will be able to show a floating bubble with the live value as they change. This should make controls where the feedback value is not beside the knob/dial/lever much more usable - e.g. the CRS / HDG knobs in the Citation-X, would show a tooltip with 'Course - 129 deg' changing in realtime. Even for toggle switches, often the legibility of the panel text isn't great, so a pop-up confirming the new state should really help people, I think. (of course we can have a global pref to disable such tips for people who find them distracting / unnecessary) But there's a final benefit - I can imagine tutorials using the same mechanism to place a prompt text in world coordinates, i.e 'click this thing here!'. Which would obviously be beneficial in many complex cockpits. That will need a bit more work, of course. I'm expect a few iterations to find something that is usable without being intrusive, so please be patient. In particular the interaction with the existing (centred) 'popup text' mechanism needs to be figured out, to avoid cluttering the screen. Regards, James -- Free Next-Gen Firewall Hardware Offer Buy your Sophos next-gen firewall before the end March 2013 and get the hardware for free! Learn more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sophos-d2d-feb ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Tooltips / usability
Hi James Maybe this leads here to extend the current liberation font set to provide some additional glyphs, i.e. key pictures etc. for tutorials or the tooltips bubbles, or some special aviation glyphs? And this for the sans and mono, and to get better readable screen fonts at all. Or is there a font already for such in the repo? I can do such work the next weeks when there is use on canvas, or does your effort still rely on plib/txf ? -Yves Am 09.02.2013 um 12:47 schrieb James Turner zakal...@mac.com: A wee heads-up, I'm working on tooltip support, since I think it could offer a huge usability win. There's a couple of points here: - hovering over a pickable item can show a configurable prompt: think 'Avionics Master: ON' or 'Fuel tank selector: LEFT TANK' - pickable controls, including the new knob animation, will be able to show a floating bubble with the live value as they change. This should make controls where the feedback value is not beside the knob/dial/lever much more usable - e.g. the CRS / HDG knobs in the Citation-X, would show a tooltip with 'Course - 129 deg' changing in realtime. Even for toggle switches, often the legibility of the panel text isn't great, so a pop-up confirming the new state should really help people, I think. (of course we can have a global pref to disable such tips for people who find them distracting / unnecessary) But there's a final benefit - I can imagine tutorials using the same mechanism to place a prompt text in world coordinates, i.e 'click this thing here!'. Which would obviously be beneficial in many complex cockpits. That will need a bit more work, of course. I'm expect a few iterations to find something that is usable without being intrusive, so please be patient. In particular the interaction with the existing (centred) 'popup text' mechanism needs to be figured out, to avoid cluttering the screen. Regards, James -- Free Next-Gen Firewall Hardware Offer Buy your Sophos next-gen firewall before the end March 2013 and get the hardware for free! Learn more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sophos-d2d-feb ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel -- Free Next-Gen Firewall Hardware Offer Buy your Sophos next-gen firewall before the end March 2013 and get the hardware for free! Learn more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sophos-d2d-feb ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Tooltips / usability
On 9 Feb 2013, at 12:14, ys flightg...@sablonier.ch wrote: Maybe this leads here to extend the current liberation font set to provide some additional glyphs, i.e. key pictures etc. for tutorials or the tooltips bubbles, or some special aviation glyphs? And this for the sans and mono, and to get better readable screen fonts at all. Or is there a font already for such in the repo? I can do such work the next weeks when there is use on canvas, or does your effort still rely on plib/txf ? It will be either osgText directly or more likely a Canvas widget. So I'm not worried about readability, but some special glyphs could be considered indeed. However, let's walk before we try to run :) James -- Free Next-Gen Firewall Hardware Offer Buy your Sophos next-gen firewall before the end March 2013 and get the hardware for free! Learn more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sophos-d2d-feb ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
